Update Paper Documents Using PDF2Go [Turotial]

Nowadays, most paperwork is done online. Thanks to PDF and documents containing fillable forms in particular, it is becoming easier to transfer all papers into digital copies. However, many documents still exist in their paper form – and their paper form only.

What if you need to update the information on the paper though? Then you can actually do that. Read on to find out how PDF2Go can help you not only digitize but also edit and update paper documents.

Edit & Update Paper Documents

The following tutorial will give you a step-by-step how-to on how you can preserve information from paper documents without having to manually type all the content.

All you need is a scanner and PDF2Go!

1. Scan your document

The first step is to create a digital copy of your paper. This is something we highly recommend anyway. Digital copies can be way more easily stored, duplicated and thus securely put away than paper copies.

In this very moment, it does not matter which format you choose for scanning your hardcopy. Most scanning hardware supports common image formats like JPG and TIFF, but we recommend saving your digital copy as PDF right away.

2. Convert your document using OCR

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. OCR allows you to extract text from images or scans in order to further edit, save or copy it. We have dedicated a whole blog article to OCR if you are interested in that: All you need to know about OCR.

With PDF2Go, it’s easy to use OCR. Here’s how you easily get your text extracted into a Microsoft Word document:

Once your document has been converted, you can download the extracted text. You are one step closer to digitizing your papers.

3. Edit your document

Now, you successfully extracted the text from your hardcopy, but there is more you can and also should do.

1. Check the text with original

OCR is no 100% guarantee that your text will be exactly the same. Sometimes, a crooked scan, non-UTF-8 characters and other issues can cause some distortion. Text passages might be missing or words might contain a weird character. Thus, it’s advised to always check with the original and quickly adjust the text so it resembles the original.

2. Convert back to PDF

There are countless reasons for why PDF is the best format to store your digitized papers. Fixed formats, reliability and the option to password protect PDF files are only a few of them. But there are even more reasons to choose PDF.